Comet card dining features temporarily unavailable

Comet card dining features temporarily unavailable

Ruth Varghese

POSTED

Certain Comet card features became unavailable at different locations on campus for three days because of planned server maintenance.

Meal exchange, Comet cash and meal money features were unavailable at different times from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1. The reason for the maintenance was to set up registers for the Starbucks on campus, said Joel Dille, the assistant director of the Smart Cards program at the Comet Card Office.

“When they started working on that Monday morning … people could still use their Comet cards, but they wouldn’t have been able to process a meal exchange on Monday at all dining locations,” Dille said. “Just during the lunchtime period.”

Because Moe’s and Smash’d had older registers, it took longer for them to come back up. The Moe’s register was down for two days, making all Comet card features unavailable. Only meal exchange was affected at Smash’d, and was not accepted until Wednesday.

“In order to tie in the two new registers here and to add another server to be able to handle the volume of all 20 food service operation(s) that we have … we needed to have outages,” said Carrie Chutes, director of food and retail services. “They were here for three days, and it was a phased process where they had to take the system down, here, there, all at once, just a couple of times in the morning to tie in the system.”

There were signs at the locations saying the restaurants didn’t accept Comet cards, and Dining Hall West was not affected.

All locations were still open for business and could accept debit or credit cards and cash.

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